it’s plain to see you’ve been settling for a fairly narrow life with just a handful of relationships. Forgive me if I’m being too pushy, but for the first time since we’ve met, you seem primed to move forward. You dumped the Boy Wonder and hung on to that flyer for a reason! Maybe you want to go home more than you realize.”
“People wanted me gone quite badly back then. In fact they shunned me. I wouldn’t know where to begin with them.”
“Simply be yourself, who’s a wonderful person, I might add. You’re as sorry as anybody about what happened,” Marta speculated. “That should count for something.”
“Brad’s folks, Lewis and Bailey Cutler, are bound to be sorrier for a start. Their life revolved around their only son.”
“They are likely still feeling the pain more than most, but I’m confident you can win them over. You did the first time around.”
An image of Brad popped into her head. His striking white-blond hair, clear blue eyes, well-proportioned features and the brilliant smile that had made him all the more handsome. He’d been smiling big the day he’d first taken Kelsey home to the Cutler estate to meet his parents. The son of the richest, most powerful man in town, determined to date the middle-class café owner’s daughter. She smiled faintly. They’d taken the trouble to get to know her because they’d respected Brad’s opinion and he’d so badly wanted them to approve of her.
“It all fell into place like a dream,” she admitted. “We got on great and they began to look forward to me being part of the family one day. It was going to be fantastic, Marta.” Her smile faded. “But it’s all gone. The magic died with Brad.”
“That old magic, yes. But the world hums with a new magic each and every day, even back in Maple Junction. It’s high time you checked it out and decided once and for all where you belong.”
“What if going back makes me feel even worse?”
“At least you’ll know you tried. In any case, it’s bound to help you move on.” Marta descended the ladder to stand at her elbow, her excitement growing. “So have you bounced the idea off your mother yet?”
“Uh, no.”
“Well, you should. She for one will be thrilled to see you.”
This wasn’t necessarily true. Marta had met Clare Graham several times when she’d visited Philadelphia. But Marta didn’t understand that the cordial vacationer was vastly different from the sober café owner. Like Kelsey, Clare was burdened with a heavy guilt over the car crash. No wonder, as folks simmering with grief and rage had suddenly branded her a bad parent for raising such a reckless daughter, and initially had punished her by avoiding the café. Clare had long insisted business was fine again, and Kelsey had taken her at her word.
Just the same, Clare had never once coaxed her to come back and had never offered a mother’s absolution for what had happened. This hurt Kelsey but she struggled to be realistic. How could she expect her mother to be stronger than herself? Kelsey never broached the idea of returning either. And when they did on rare occasions speak of the accident, they still fed off each other’s guilt. Having lost Kelsey’s father, Paul, to a brain aneurism when Kelsey was nearly ten, they both fully understood the gaping hole that death left in a family.
On the other hand, they’d always been a team because of his death, keeping the café up and running together. Kelsey missed the close bond they’d once shared and wanted it back.
Later that evening, back at her dinky downtown condo on Monroe Avenue, Kelsey sat at the table in her nook with her new set of colored pens and an assortment of stationery. Also in front of her was the acceptance form from the reunion flyer, filled out and clipped along the dotted line.
With a flourish she stuffed the form, a cheery note and a check for the fifty-dollar fee into an envelope addressed to the reunion coordinator, her closest childhood friend, Sarah Yates. Done! No turning back now. She was homeward bound.
Marta’s efforts had given her the final nudge she’d needed. The past decade in Philadelphia had indeed been a disappointment, nothing like her original dreams of teaching alongside Sarah at the local elementary school, then marriage and kids. Her inability to rise above those old hometown hurts had kept her emotionally frozen.
Perhaps the only way to move forward was to first take the trip back.
On many levels the very idea was scary, preposterous. Would anyone welcome her? To make this work, she had to believe they would. That even if they couldn’t forget what had happened, they’d be willing to forgive.
Then with any luck, maybe she could finally forgive herself.
She needed to let her mother know. Although it seemed most reasonable just to call, Kelsey knew that if she detected the tiniest bit of hesitation in Clare’s tone, she’d chicken out.
Picking up a pen with cheery orange ink, she held it over some bright floral-bordered paper, rehearsing aloud what she’d write.
“Dear Mom. It’s been awhile since you’ve visited Pennsylvania. Too long, really. Seems about time I came back to Wisconsin.
“Dear Mom, Guess what? Wonderful news. I’m coming home.”
With a sigh, she set pen to paper. “Dear Mom, Just want to prepare you. I’m returning home for the reunion….”
Chapter Two
Sheriff Ethan Taggert was still at the station when the emergency call came in from the Cutler mansion, so he responded in the squad car. With siren blaring and roof bar lights flashing, he tore down Cutler Trail doing close to eighty.
The trail had been named 150 years ago, when Thomas Cutler had bought a thousand acres along what had amounted to a bumpy narrow ditch. He’d built a house, made the ditch a road and started up a newspaper. The newspaper was the start of an empire that had soon grown to include several local businesses, including the bank, and had made the family a fortune.
Thomas Cutler had wasted no time advertising far and wide that Maple Junction, Wisconsin, was a quaint dairy town worth visiting by horseless carriage. There was toboggan racing in the winter, maple-syrup tapping in the spring, strawberry picking in the summer, and the corn harvest in the autumn, and each had spawned its own festival, not to mention a county fair and several horse shows.
And all were reported in the daily paper, the Cutler Express.
All looked quiet as Ethan wheeled through the estate’s huge steel gates and up the sweeping paved drive. The windows of the sprawling stone mansion were alight, glowing on all three levels.
He desperately hoped Lewis hadn’t had another heart attack….
Lewis had become a second father to Ethan ever since, as four-year-olds, he and Lewis’s son Bradley had enjoyed a weekly wrestle under the willow trees outside church each Sunday. With parents too busy with chores and errands, young kids in the small rural community didn’t get to play together too often, so he’d started to really look forward to Sundays.
In due time, after Ethan had mastered tying his own shoes, his mother had started to drop him off at the mansion for play dates. The boys had spent their time kicking a soccer ball, digging holes in search of treasure and wading through swampland to catch toads, all
